Previous Winners

The Wiener Library is pleased to announce that the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History for 2015 has been awarded as follows:

Category A

No category A prize awarded.

Category B

Jointly awarded to:

Dr Ana Antic, Birkbeck, University of London, UK: Psychiatry at war: Psychiatric culture and political ideology in Yugoslavia under the Nazi occupation

"Antic has written a remarkably original case study in the psycho-social impacts of sustained exposure to violence, both on traumatized individuals and on the psychiatric professionals who treated them as patients. Relying on an unusually rich record of patient files and case notes from wartime and immediately postwar Yugoslavia, Antic opens an unexpected window onto the mental and affective experience of everyday life in conditions of war, occupation and regime change, while also demonstrating the significance of this period as a key transitional moment in the intellectual history of psychiatry. The study stands out for its deft balancing of the ideological, social and professional dynamics at work in this period, and offers us novel and compelling perspectives on Yugoslavia’s social and political history."

Dr Patrick Houlihan, University of Chicago, USA: Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1922

"This is a sophisticated and elegantly written study that takes a fresh approach to the role of Catholicism among the Central Powers during the First World War, looking not just at Germany but also at Austria-Hungary. Using a wealth of wide-ranging sources, Houlihan challenges the narratives that have stressed secularisation, and emphasises the extent to which Catholic belief helped Germans and Austrians – women as well as men – to endure the hardships and sacrifices of war. Houlihan pays due attention to theoretical issues without taking refuge in them, and shows how the ‘lived religion’ of wartime Catholicism and its postwar vitality challenges us to rethink standard narratives and periodizations."

The panel highly commended the following entry:

Ned Richardson-Little, University of Exeter, UK: Between Dictatorship and Dissent: Ideology, Legitimacy, and Human Rights in East Germany, 1945-1990

"The committee was impressed by Richardson-Little’s lively revisionist history of human rights in the German Democratic Republic. He persuasively shows that, unlike other East Bloc regimes, the GDR state integrated human rights into its constitutional foundation and political identity, and made considerable efforts to broaden this so-called rights culture to the broader population. Among other findings, Richardson-Little shows that the state’s co-optation of human rights helps to explain why the Helsinki Accords did not serve as a watershed event for the GDR’s dissident movement in the 1970s: instead, its development did not take place until the 1980s and under the banner of other causes."

Dr Hester Vaizey (UK): The German Family, 1939-1956: Nazism, War and Reconstruction

The panel also commended Dr Julie Schmid (Germany) for Kampf um das Deutschtum. The German-national Community of Experience in Austria and the German Empire (1890-1914) and Dr Felicia Yap (UK) for Captives of Empire: Colonial Society Under Japanese Internment, 1942-45

The panel also commended Dr Nir Arieli (Israel) for Fascist Italy and the Middle East, 1935-1940 and Dr Scott Ury (Israel) for Red Banner, Blue Star: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry.